Housing Bonds And State Growth

CHICAGO — Your editorial criticizing use of housing bonds to finance a building in the Illinois Center residential complex is a one-sided affair that omits salient information to balance the case (``Building Illinois--for whom?``

April 1).

First and foremost, while properly bemoaning the fact that the lowest rentals made available through tax-exempt financing will not serve the neediest renters, you ignore the central reason. That is, the death of federal subsidy programs, which for decades helped create affordable rents for low-and lower-middle income families and the elderly.

The Illinois Housing Development Authority, from its inception in 1967 to the end of Section 8 subsidies in 1983, was able to combine these subsidies with tax-exempt financing through housing bonds to create some 25,000 dwelling units for low- and moderate-income people, including the lowest rungs of the economic ladder.

Housing bonds are admittedly an insufficient mechanism to provide such deep subsidization, but they are all that is available. To eliminate them would be folly--and the current congressional tax reform legislation wisely retains them in recognition of that fact.

We would also remind you that the legislature mandate of this agency is to serve moderate-income as well as low-income families.

If The Tribune agrees that the neediest must have affordable housing other than the concrete ghettos of public housing, then by all means launch an editorial campaign to restore subsidies at the federal level.

Equally important is your omission of a very strong reason to finance buildings such as Illinois Center: economic development. Illinois Center apartments will provide an estimated 500 jobs in the construction and related fields, and generate over $10 million in wages and about $2.5 million in taxes at all levels of government. Surely a case can be made for this boost to the state`s economy.

Finally, there is a regrettable implication that this project came about because the involved legal and financial firms may have donated to Gov. Thompson`s campaign. This misleading suggestion damages the integrity of an agency that has never had the trace of fiscal scandal attached to it in the course of its history.

I suspect you cannot find a major legal or financial firm in the state that has not made such contributions--and made them to both sides. The IHDA has operated on a nonpartisan basis throughout its history. It borders on the irresponsible to suggest such improper influence, even through indirection.